Harry Sanborn (Nicholson)
is dating a woman, Marin Barry (Peet), who is much younger than he is.
In fact, he only dates young women. Period.

Marin takes Harry on a
weekend to his mother Erica's (Keaton) Hamptons beach house, thinking
they would be alone. But, Erica and her sister Zoe (McDormand) show up
unexpectedly, as Harry is getting something from the refrigerator, while
just in his underwear.

After the initial shock,
everyone calms down, and they decide to all stay for the weekend. After
all, they are adults, aren't they?

The excitement is a bit too
much for Harry, and he ends up in the hospital with a mild heart attack.
Doctor Julian Mercer (Reeves) tells Harry he can't go home right away,
but must stay locally for a week so he can check on his progress before
he leaves.

So, Harry ends up staying
in the beach house, even though he and Erica don't exactly get along.

Harry and Erica get to know
each other, and bit by bit, Harry realizes what he has been missing by
not paying attention to women his own age. He breaks up with Marin, and
he and Erica begin a serious love affair, despite Harry's sworn bachelorhood.

It gets more complicated
when Dr. Mercer becomes romantically interested in Erica, making Harry
jealous.

After the week is over,
Harry has to go home, reluctantly, and Erica, who has professed her love
for Harry, pours her heart out, writing a play about her experiences
with Harry.

Commentary

The film is delightful, and
of course, Nicholson is at his best. Although Keaton was nominated for
an Academy Award for her performance, it is really Nicholson who should
have had the accolades.

Extras

These include a Commentary
by the Director, Audio Commentary by Nicholson and Keaton, Harry Sings
Karaoke, Hamptons House Tour, Filmographies, and Trailers.

While excavating in the
Dordogne Valley of France, a scientific research team's new invention, a
time travel machine, has inadvertently sent archaeology professor Edward
Johnston back to 14th-century France, and has landed him in the middle
of the raging Hundred Years War between the French and English.
Johnston's only chance for rescue lies in the hands of his son Chris,
his assistant professor Andre Marek, and several of his students.
The intrepid time travelers must make the same journey and, with the
deadline of only eight hours now ticking away, must navigate through the
hostile, war-torn territory and retrieve the professor before he's lost
to history forever.

Commentary

Though I have not read it,
I imagine that the Michael Crichton book, like the above synopsis, is
good. The movie unfortunately does not fare as well.

At first it seems we might
be in for classic Twilight Zone material, or perhaps the fun of
Back to the
Future, but we get neither. This movie is grossly overacted with
incredibly bad dialogue. Francis
O'Connor comes across as too old for her roll, and we end up just not
buying any of it. The medieval war element feels second hand, and the
whole picture is simply uninteresting.

While some high production
values are evident, it failed to hold my attention for the duration.

Extras

There is a three part
documentary, "Journey Through Timeline", covering the making of the
film. Despite the movie scoring poor for me, I
enjoyed these featurettes because, unlike so many making-ofs which
are nothing more than extended previews, these really do take you behind
the scenes and show us how much of it was made.

There is also "The Textures
of Timeline" which is a documentary that covers creating the look of
the period. Most of it could have been spliced into the previously
mentioned documentaries.

A set of trailers rounds out
the extras.

Technical

While generally presenting
us with a pleasing picture, there is enough ringing and/or edge enhancement to distract, and at times detail seems to have been filtered right out of existence.
It is, as we expect these days, very consistent from start to finish in
terms of color and fidelity. The blacks are right on the money,
imparting dept without disappearing.

The soundtrack is an
absolute delight. There are dynamic explosions and wrap-around
effects, all without being too loud, harsh, or over the top.
Subtle audio textures are exploited to put us into the locals without
distracting us. Dialogue is for the most part perfectly clear, but
on one or two occasions, it comes across as muffled and one needs to
strain a little to understand what is being said.

Neo (Reeves) is stuck in a
world between the real world of the machines and the Matrix world of
being "jacked in". In this netherworld, Neo cannot perform his amazing
acrobatics, but no one else can either.

Morpheus (Fishburne) and
Trinity (Moss) are trying to get him back, but Neo remains, sitting in a
train station that runs only in a circle.

Smith (Weaving) wants to
find Neo and destroy him, as Neo is still a huge threat to the machines.

Meanwhile, the rest of
humanity is hiding, waiting for the machines to attack them, and when
they finally do, it is a battle beyond anything that has ever been seen
before.

Smith finally locates Neo,
and they have their own showdown, wherein Smith's true identity is
revealed.

Commentary

Revolutions has an amazing
series of CG battle scenes that make all previous movies with such things look
like Captain Kangaroo. I remember one of the producers saying on a TV
program that they wanted to have the CG in this film be something
everyone would remember. Well, I will be remembering this for a long
time. The deep bass is so tremendous, it moved the chassis cover on one
of my amplifiers off to the side. If you want a DVD to test your system
to the limits, buy Revolutions. It should be at CostCo as we speak.

Extras

The extras are on a
separate disc, and include The Making Of, Special Effects, Analysis of
Neo and Smiths' Final Brawl, Analysis of The Matrix Game, Matrix
Timeline, and A Stills Gallery.

Technical

The only thing I don't like
about this series is the omnipresent green cast to the picture. It looks
like the whole thing was filmed in fluorescent lighting without any
filter compensation. However, I simply reduced the green in my projector
by 10 units, and it looked fine. I realize this is not the way the
director intended for me to watch it, but it's my theater and my
eyeballs. After all, they probably just added 10 units of green
in post production. The green cast is related to the green computer
screen monitor, representing the Matrix. But when was the last time you
used a monochrome green computer monitor? 1989?

Tom Ripley (Malkovich) is
retired and living in a small Italian town. He is rich and considered
strange by the locals. Jonathan Trevanny (Scott) and his wife Sarah (Headey)
are two of those locals. Unbeknown to the townspeople, Tom is an
international criminal, wanted for grand theft and murder.

Jonathan is suffering from
terminal leukemia and is short on money.

One of Tom's criminal
associates, Reeves (Winstone), wants Tom to assassinate a competitor
in Berlin, a Russian. Because Jonathan insulted him at a party, Tom
chooses the naive Jonathan to do the dirty work.

Reeves contacts Jonathan
and offers him $50,000 plus a second opinion from a renown doctor in
Berlin if he will kill the Russian. When Jonathan turns it down, Tom
tells Reeves to add $50,000 more to the offer, and he will pay it
himself.

This time, Jonathan accepts
the offer, but does not tell his wife what he is up to.

The murder goes well, and
now Reeves wants Jonathan to kill more of the Russian criminals to stir
up a war between the Russian gang and the Ukranians.

The party starts to get
rough, and Jonathan starts to enjoy the game.

Commentary

This is an independent
film, and it is very well done. I rented it because I like Malkovich,
but it turned out to have great performances by Scott and Winstone as
well. And, the plot is quite novel. It is shot entirely in Italy and
Germany, so there is some fine architecture to boot.

Note that this is the same
character as in The Talented Mr. Ripley, years later.

Kathy (Connelly) is a young
woman living in San Francisco. Her husband left her six months ago, and
she has no job.

Early one morning, she is
served with an eviction notice for not paying taxes on her business. The
problem is, she never had a business. Nevertheless, she has to pack up
her belongings and leave the house that her father had given to her in
his will.

She contacts a lawyer,
Connie Walsh (Fisher) who tells her she can get her house back as soon
as she processes some paperwork notifying the State Offices of the mistake.

In the meantime, retired
Iranian Colonel Behrani (Kingsley) purchases the house at a state
auction, and moves in with his wife Nadi (Shohreh Aghadashloo) and son.

Behrani begins refurbishing
the house so he can sell it at a big profit and move to a larger home.

One of the police officers,
Lester (Eldard), who evicted Kathy, befriends her and tries to help by
antagonizing Behrani to sell the home back to the state for the low
price that he paid.

Things get out of hand, and
tragedy strikes for all concerned.

Commentary

This is the most depressing
movie I have ever seen, and yet, it is superbly entertaining. It has
stellar performances not only by Connelly and Kingsley, but also Aghdashloo, who did not receive much credit in the billing, but who was
praised at the Academy Award ceremony.

Extras

These include Deleted
Scenes with Commentary, Commentary with Ben Kingsley, Director Vadim
Perelman, and Andre Dubus III who wrote the novel on which the movie was
based, Behind the Scenes Featurette.

There is no way to
summarize the plot (even Universal doesn't attempt one on the DVD
jacket) except to say that it is a collection of stories about couples,
with some threads between each one to keep the bigger picture flowing. A plot summary would
just
be too complex. Through each couple, we explore love on
various levels. Some relationships are unspoken, some are awkward,
some are youthful, some are at the office, some are dysfunctional at
home, and so on.

Commentary

This is a brilliant piece
of romantic comedy which cannot possibly be called a "chick flick".
The multiple intertwining storylines offer enough complication to
stimulate us mentally, and it has a wicked British humor that at times
had me roaring out loud. At the same time it has that feel-good
quality that is irresistible in an age where violence oriented
depressing comic book anti-hero action movies seem to be the norm.

Music needs a special
mention. Pop music is used extensively to tie the various
fragments
together and it's use is brilliant, almost Tarantio-esque.

Extras

There is a feature length
commentary which includes Hugh Grant, Bill Nighy, Thomas Sangster, and
director Richard Curtis. I've always said that to sit through any
commentary track one has to really be interested in the fabric of a
film. Even so, this group is entertaining and hams it up enough to
make a second trip through the film worthwhile.

There are over 30 minutes
of deleted scenes. It's fascinating that the original cut was about
210 minutes. Obviously a lot had to be trimmed. It might
have been interesting to see the whole 3.5 hour cut but taken somewhat
out of the larger context, the deleted scenes do seem, as most do, to
have been deleted for a reason.

There is piece by Richard
Curtis that discusses the Music of Love Actually.

A music video, The Trouble
with Love Is, sung by Kelly Clarkson, rounds out the extras.

Technical

The video transfer is on
the whole quite good. There is only a faint touch of edge
enhancement and/or ringing, certainly less than we are used to, and the
dynamic range is balanced at both ends. Blacks are nice and deep,
while color saturation is consistent throughout. Unfortunately,
the picture does have a rather soft feel to it, and almost comes across
as out of focus (likely an over aggressive use of the vertical filter
during encoding).

The audio is absolutely
perfect. At no time did I strain to get a piece of dialog, and
there was not a single instance of mic preamp clipping. Music,
being such a critical part of this soundtrack, is very well served, being
distributed across the front soundstage, unlike lesser efforts which
omit music completely from the center channel. The few opportunities
for surround effects are well implemented in a discretionary fashion and
do not distract from the screen.

Thurman plays a woman ("the
Bride") who wakes up from a four year coma, the only survivor of her own
wedding party in El Paso, Texas, that has been attacked by a gang of
assassins.

She regains her strength,
and remembers the assassins' faces. They were members of a secret cult
to which she had belonged herself.

The bride is out for
revenge, not only for herself, but her husband and unborn child.

The first one, Vernita
Green (Fox), is now a housewife with a daughter, but the bride gives no
quarter, and kills her with a Bowie knife.

The second one, O-Ren Ishii
(Liu), is the head of gang families in Tokyo, protected by many
bodyguards, so she asks a master Samurai sword artisan to make her a
sword that cannot be broken.

The bride now confronts
Ishii and her band of cut throats.

Commentary

When I first heard of this
movie coming to the theaters, I thought it must be ridiculous, going by
the title. Little did I know it would turn out to be the masterpiece
that it is. Bill is Tarantino's best work and is as good as anything Spielberg has ever done.

The film uses animation
here and there, possibly because the scenes are so violent, that if they
were live action, the movie would have had to be rated "X".

I can see why the DVD was
released about the same time as Kill Bill, Volume 2 came out at the
theaters. You will definitely want to see both movies if you rent the
DVD.

Extras

These include "The Making
of", Bonus Musical Performances by "The 5, 6, 7, 8s" (a band that is
playing in the Tokyo nightclub where the bride confronts O-Ren Ishii),
and Movie Trailers.

Technical

There is quite a bit of
ringing in the image, indicating too much edge enhancement.

In 1805, with Napoleon
marching across Europe, Captain Jack Aubrey (Crowe) is given the order
to take his ship, the Surprise, and hunt down the French ship Acheron.

First, he searches off the
coast of Brazil, and then, thinks his best option of finding the Acheron
is to look near the Galapagos Islands.

All the while, he must be
careful not to let the Acheron sneak up behind him, since the French
vessel is much faster and carries more guns.

Commentary

This movie is much
overrated, and I can't imagine how it got such accolades, unless they
were comparing it to Tommy Choo Choo or other such drivel. The story is
filled with way too many mundane activities such as sitting around the
dinner table and cracking ridiculous jokes, swabbing the decks, and
measuring the necks of tortoises along with drawing pictures of bugs
they find on the Galapagos Islands.

If you want to see a real
swashbuckler movie that holds your attention from start to finish, you
have to go back to the 1940s to see The Sea Hawk. With
Commander, you will find yourself wanting to hit the chapter skip
button quite often. There's no punch line, no intrigue, no surprises. In other words, dull. It moves far too slow, and
could have been edited down to 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Extras

There are no extras.

Technical

The movie is shot with a
lot of haze and backlighting that obscure the visibility of the
characters and their surroundings. Peter Weir is a good director, but
this is just plain lousy choices. It does not create a mood. It just
gets in the way of watching the story unfold.

The audio, though, is
terrific, with great location sound effects on board the ship.